Full-Text Articles in Education

Valuing The Leadership Role Of University Unit Coordinators, Coral Pepper, Susan Roberts

ECU Publications Post 2013

In this paper we describe the experiences of 64 unit coordinators across 15 Australian universities, gathered during 2011/2012 as part of an Office for Learning and Teaching (OLT) project. Our intention was to gain insight into how unit coordinators (academics who coordinate a discrete unit of study) perceive their role as leaders of learning in higher education and whether the support provided to them by their institutions meets their needs. The study is of international significance given the rapidly changing higher education landscape with larger class sizes, reduced funding and the increasing use of technology occurring globally. Following a ...

ECU Publications Post 2013

Recent Australian government policy has focused on attracting students from under-represented and diverse groups to tertiary education with university enabling courses one pathway for these students. The trend towards broader participation has altered traditional perceptions of a typical university student and raised delivery challenges. The ability to engage these students as learners and improve their academic outcomes and confidence towards successful course completion, is increasingly important to universities because of attrition costs to governments, students and higher education institutions, and is increasingly reflected in academic literature. While strategic student support options have been examined in detail, less focus has been ...

ECU Publications Post 2013

This paper describes discipline-specific transition support utilised to follow-up the Post-Entry Language Assessment (PELA) recently introduced at Edith Cowan University as one strategy to address declining rates of English language proficiency. Transition support was embedded within a first year core unit and emphasis was placed on assisting students to develop spoken and written communicative competencies by scaffolding assessment tasks and providing other academic supports that used contextualised examples. While general satisfaction with the academic support offered during the course was high, the program achieved limited success in encouraging at-risk students to seek support. Further investigation into methods of encouraging student ...

Completing A Phd By Publication: A Review Of Australian Policy And Implications For Practice, Denise Jackson

ECU Publications 2013

There is increasing impetus for higher degree by research students to publish during candidature. Research performance, including higher degree completions and publication output, commonly determines university funding and doctorates with publishing experience are better positioned for a career in softening academic labour markets. The PhD by Publication provides a pathway for candidates to foster and demonstrate their publishing capabilities. It also provides existing academics a means of achieving doctoral status while managing the ‘publish or perish’ milieu endemic to their work. This paper clarifies the precise nature and significance of the PhD by Publication pathway in the Australian context and ...

Identifying Students Requiring English Language Support: What Role Can A Pela Play?, Anne J. Harris

ECU Publications 2013

The number of higher education providers implementing a post-entry English Language Assessment (PELA) has increased exponentially in the past six years. This uptake has been driven largely by the “Good Practice Principles”, the TEQSA Act 2011, and TEQSA’s Quality Assessment on English Language Proficiency. Evidence suggests that at least 50% of Australian universities now offer some form of PELA, but few compel students to complete it. This paper discusses four years of learning that took place in one university, beginning with trialling a range of PELAs through to the endorsement of a short written task in all undergraduate courses ...

Employability Skill Development In Work-Integrated Learning: Barriers And Best Practice, Denise Jackson

ECU Publications 2013

Work-integrated learning (WIL) is widely considered instrumental in equipping new graduates with the required employability skills to function effectively in the work environment. Evaluation of WIL programs in enhancing skill development remains predominantly outcomes-focused with little attention to the process of what, how and from whom students acquire essential skills during work placement. This paper investigates best practice in the classroom and placement activities which develop employability skills and identifies factors impeding skill performance during WIL, based on survey data from 131 undergraduates across different disciplines in an Australian university. What students actually experienced during placement, or what they felt ...

ECU Publications 2012

Chronic victimization negatively affects mental health, making it crucial to understand the key predictive social health (e.g., loneliness, isolation) factors. Evidence suggests that the effects of victimization are worse over the transition from primary to secondary school. Longitudinal data from 1810 students transitioning were used to identify victimization trajectory groups, classified as low increasing, low stable, medium stable, and not bullied. Adolescents with poorer social health were more likely to be in the increasing and stable victimized group than in the not bullied group. Students in the low increasing victimized group had poorer mental health outcomes than those in ...

A Theoretically Grounded Exploration Of The Social And Emotional Outcomes Of Transition To Secondary School, Stacey Waters, Leanne Lester, Elizabeth Wenden, Donna Cross

ECU Publications 2012

Adolescent development involves a complex interplay between genetics, biology, and social and emotional relationships within multiple contexts of home, school and the broader community. The transition from primary to secondary school, coupled with the onset of puberty, can therefore be a difficult period for young people to negotiate at a critical period of their developmental pathway. Using a social ecological perspective, this article examines the impact of the transition experience on adolescent social and emotional health, both immediately following transition to secondary school and at the end of the first year in this new school environment. This 1-year prospective study ...

ECU Publications 2012

This study aimed to investigate the causal pathways and factors associated with being involved in bullying behaviour as a bully-victim using longitudinal data from students aged 11-14 years over the transition time from primary to secondary school. Examination of bully-victim pathways suggest a critical time to intervene is prior to transition from the end of primary school to the beginning of secondary school to prevent and reduce the harm from bullying. Negative outcome expectancies from bullying perpetration were a significant predictor of being a bully-victim at the end of the first year of secondary school. The findings show an association ...

ECU Publications 2012

Covert bullying behaviours are at least as distressing for young people as overt forms of bullying, but often remain unnoticed or unacknowledged by adults. This invisibility is increased in schools by inattention to covert bullying in policy and practice, and limited staff understanding and skill to address covert behaviours. These factors can lead to a school culture that appears to tolerate and thus inadvertently encourages covert bullying. This study explores these dynamics in Australian primary and secondary schools, including the attitudes of over 400 staff towards covert bullying, their understanding of covert bullying behaviours, and their perceived capacity to address ...

Staff Perspectives On The Role Of English Proficiency In Providing Support Services, Sophia Harryba, Andrew Guilfoyle, Shirlee-Ann Knight

ECU Publications 2011

A case study approach was applied to understand the challenges of offering support services to international students (IS) within a university setting. A social constructivist theoretical framework informed the collection and analysis of data. Perspectives from service providers - general and academic staff members and international students were triangulated. To date, 63 participants have been interviewed and preliminary findings show that although international students encounter a number of academic and socio-cultural difficulties during university transition, many do not access support services offered by university for various reasons including; perceived language and cultural barriers, unawareness, feeling uncomfortable; and avoiding any stigma associated ...

ECU Publications 2011

Leadership is a practical skill, highly valued by employers but not formally taught in Australian psychology curricula. The Edith Cowan University School of Psychology and Social Science developed a programme aimed at addressing the lack of leadership training in undergraduate psychology students. This 12-month extracurricular programme provided theoretical and practical experience in leadership, and incorporated a formal series of workshops and seminars with three curricular components: leadership knowledge, leadership skills, and leadership in action. Students were then provided with the opportunity to develop and practise their leadership skills by participating in a series of expert-driven seminars, through role-playing, perspective taking ...

ECU Publications 2011

The paper presents a stages model that guided the efforts of an academic unit at an Australian university to improve its research performance. Aiming to grow the research culture it used the re-engineering approach to bring about a transformation. There are four stages in the model used: establishing the current research presence, facilitating research interaction, increasing research transactions and achieving research transformation. Part of stage 1 was a survey to establish significant gaps between staff research expectations and perceptions. Progress for stages 1 and 2 were able to be managed within the academic unit but stage 3 was largely influenced ...

ECU Publications 2011

This paper reports the outcomes of the second action cycle of an ongoing project at Edith Cowan University (ECU) called "Transition to Sustainability: ECU South West" which is located in a small, single faculty regional university campus. The overall project has comprised three action research cycles, the first of which was the planning cycle which established the importance of building a community of practice with a learning stance for sustainability transition. It also highlighted the issue of a common definition of the term sustainability; of including cross-disciplinary perspectives; and of working with the local community. The second action cycle which ...

Directions For Change In H.E. In The Mekong Region: Pasts-Thinking To Futures-Thinking, And City Universities To Village Colleges, Martin Allinson

EDU-COM International Conference

Written by a retired university and college engineering teacher, who (at 73) is now Khon Kaen University‘s oldest student, doing a PhD study of Sustainable Development‘s Curriculum Effects, the paper is directed primarily to young members of faculty who are looking forward to their careers in universities as those universities will be in the future. The paper provides a challenge to universities in response to geopolitical change. While at first glance the scenario of global resource depletion and impact on the local Mekong Basin community presents a depressing picture, the paper provides an optimistic option based on forward ...

The Islamic Azad University And Iran’S Social Development, Ratchaporn Simbar

EDU-COM International Conference

Higher education in an era of emerging organizational model, being recognized as one of the principal social affairs and a delicate endeavour, can not and should not be left with the government alone. In an attempt to lighten the government‘s responsibility to provide the nation with higher education, Islamic Azad University was established in Iran. With the growing tendencies of Iranian families in making their children enter university along with the soaring demand for higher education, the government itself could not have been able to satisfy the needs. Meanwhile, training and education can be seen as the main factors ...

Managing Change In Schools: A Review Of The Western Australian Project, Rod Chadbourne

ECU Publications Pre. 2011

In 1987, the Ministry of Education released a report entitled 'Better Schools in Western Australia: A Program for Improvement'.l It outlined radical proposals to make schools more self-determining and accountable. Although much of the program has yet to be put into effect, the plan and steps taken to implement it caused a major upheaval not only to the system but also to people working in it. For example: the managers of change invested a huge amount of work and worry in the whole process; some of the 'victims' of change suffered personally and professionally; and a lot of those ...